Confidence in the Nishida’s Gymnastics club is high, as 19 of their rising stars are set to grace the 34th staging of the Annual Gasparilla Classic Gymnastics competition in Tampa, Florida, this weekend.

The 19 gymnasts and four coaches — head coach and junior director of Nishida’s Gymnastics Tristan Hall, Kareem Johnson, Elton Walters and Sherwin Young — are scheduled to depart the island on Wednesday for the February 25-27 event, which is rated as one of, if not, the largest gym meet held in this side of the world.

Despite being absent from international competition for a year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic and the many challenges faced by the gym in general, Johnson is confident the team will defy the odds and give a good account of themselves.

Accoring to Johnson, limited training sessions due to curfew hours as part of the Government’s protocol to stem the spread of the infectious virus was one of the biggest obstacles the club had to overcome in order to get the gymnasts competition ready.

“Normally, we would have four hours of training per day, but we had to think about the amount of numbers we wanted to have for any one session to ensure that we still abided by the protocols.

“So we had to split the group and we were down to two days per week and sometimes some of the gymnasts only gets one day per week. So we tried our best to get the ready as we continued go to adjust to the changing times,” Johnson told the Jamaica Observer.

“But we are pleased with how things went, we made it work, even though we didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do, but we did our best to prepare the athletes,” he added.

The gymnasts, who range from ages five to 15, will compete in levels one to nine with fierce competition expected from teams within the United States, as well as teams from Puerto Rico, Ecuador, The Bahamas and Columbia.

Still, Johnson reinforced that the task at hand is not beyond them, as they seek to add to the 14-year-old club’s rich history.

The Shortwood Road-based club has had students competing on the international scene since 2009, winning various top spots starting with the boy’s junior team that won in the Level seven All Around category on their first outing to the United States at this same meet in 2009.

Those results continued in the years that followed both for boys and girls, but later multiplied tremendously in 2019 and 2020 with the students securing many first-place spots both in the individual and team category.

“I am very confident that they will do well. It will be tough competition because its a huge meet where you have different states coming in to compete as well Caribbean Islands but the records show that its a meet where we always produce good performances and despite the setbacks, I am expecting the trend to continue,” said Johnson.

Nishida’s Gymnastics has always had a number of its athletes being a part of Jamaica’s National Gymnastics Team that have done really great at various international meets.

In fact, the club had Jamaica’s first representative in Men’s gymnastics at the World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow, 2015 and later its first representative in the Pan American Championships in Columbia, 2021.

This Gasparilla Classic represents another stepping stone in the club’s objective, which is to produce an Olympic gymnast.